Unfortunately, the prevailing culture in my area is "How will you know how important I am if I'm not visibly in the office working very visibly in front of important people? Time off is for losers who aren't visibly important! If I take time off, it's obvious someone else can do my job! If you truly cared about this company, you'd be here! You got married so you'd have someone to run the errands and schlep the kids around, if we hire women, we'll need to give them time off to deal with the kids (though I'm not allowed to say that anymore)."

I've had multiple managers who greeted my request for time off with a faint pout of disapproval and a slight tone of "Lazy slacker" in their voice. For a long time, the prevailing business philosophy was "the employee will try to get away with as little as possible, management must keep an eye on them to keep their noses to the grindstone."

That's one of the things that actually scares me the most about going to work in corporate America. I'm a hard worker and I will always get my work done, but this prevailing culture of working long hours and being expected to be on-call and checking emails all the time and not taking any time off seems like it will suck.

I get two weeks plus three floating holidays (though bear in mind I only get two fixed holidays).

Also, current co-worker conversation is on flat-earth theory. Apparently another co-worker believes the world is flat, or at least likes making that argument.

Flat earth?!? Seriously??? Who ARE these people??

Do you work with Shaq or something?

Flat earth?!? Seriously??? Who ARE these people??

Yeah. That's really weird. I mean, aside from everything else, you can, you know, fly around it.

OTOH, Trump is President, so flat earth? Sure, why not.

I didn't pay too much attention to the "logic" of the arguments. I think it's a case of "How can I be clever and rile people up?" rather than actual belief.

Unlimited time off has gotten to be a pretty common perk in techlandia - the upside is not having to do the obsessive how many hours do I have left thing, and the companies that do it right really are more humane than most. The downside is that some companies abuse it - either by dangling it as a perk when workload is too high to ever take it, or using the fact that there isn't a fixed amount in the compensation package to avoid paying out accrued time when people leave.

Or punishing people who take "too much" time off in other intangible ways. I like having a set number of days that I am entitled to as a part of my overall compensation, because there is no question about taking too much time off.